Revenue Planning

Revenue planning helps companies align resources to achieve their revenue and profit goals. This top-line planning is arguably the most important exercise for supporting ongoing growth and overall success. Typically, however, it’s a slow, manual process requiring data from sales and marketing systems, manual consolidation, and further manual data entry, all built on a platform of spreadsheets. 

Eliminating Headache by Eliminating Spreadsheets

But using spreadsheets for revenue planning is often prone to errors—transposed numbers, missing data fields, calculation typos, duplicates, and other common mistakes. Furthermore, the finance department is often stuck waiting around for sales, marketing, and other departments to deliver their figures. It’s a risky proposition, and one that is almost archaic given today’s technology and streamlined systems integrations.

Continuous Planning software is a fast and easy solution to the risks of manual, spreadsheet-based revenue planning. It can be easily integrated with CRM and marketing automation so it’s always pulling the latest sales and pipeline data. It increases accuracy and confidence simply by eliminating human error and discrepancies in manual data transfers. Automation also speeds creation of revenue plans by putting data just a click away. 

With full access to all of the data needed for revenue planning, finance can spend more time analyzing and actually planning and less time trying to capture and corral the right data. This means more accurately predicted sales commissions and bonuses, creation of fair territories, visibility into the impact of sales forecast changes, and more.

Continuous Planning also eliminates the complex, manual analysis steps spreadsheets require. Instead, it’s easier and faster to view dashboards, develop reports, and drill deeper into the data to see underlying details. Continuous Planning provides a clear drilldown into the source of data so questions can be quickly answered. The result is both finance and the executive team can have complete confidence in the reports and sales forecasting models produced.

With easier access to accurate sales planning data, plus connections to other financial and operational data, Continuous Planning enables finance to accomplish even more.

Easily tie sales forecasts to revenue models. Continuous Planning lets finance provide weekly snapshots, updates to sales stages with flow-through, discount modeling, and waterline forecasting. Finance can also drive top-down, middle-out, and bottom-up sales adjustments through the entire sales organization.

Instantly integrate quota, commission, and territory planning. Continuous Planning allows finance to create quota and commission plans that motivate performance. It eases modeling of spiffs, spot bonuses, and other compensation exceptions. It provides insights to create fair territories, using data from sales and marketing such as leads, opportunities, pipeline, and accounts. And, it lets finance model different scenarios including direct and indirect channels, and territories to the zip-code level.

Go deeper with more insightful trend reporting. Continuous Planning let’s finance analyze current vs. historical performance with weekly or daily snapshots, and easily create and distribute week-over-week reports that allow analysis across representatives, managers, sales stages, categories, and more.

When it comes to revenue planning, Continuous Planning eases the burden on finance and sales while making the resulting forecasts more accurate, more insightful, and more detailed. And it’s all driven by Continuous Planning’s key features:

• Automated data collection from sales and marketing systems
• Flexible planning and forecasting capabilities
• Powerful multidimensional modeling engine
• Familiar web, Excel, or mobile interfaces
• Easy to use reporting and analysis
• Scalable, secure cloud architecture

Eliminate the time wasted on manual data collection and complex spreadsheets and increase the accuracy of your revenue plans and forecasts, all with Planful. Learn more about how to eliminate spreadsheets for revenue planning.